The Slaveholding Crisis: Fear of Insurrection and the Coming of the Civil War. By Carl Lawrence Paulus (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2017). Pp. 328. Cloth, $49.95.

To fully understand the coming of the Civil War, Carl Paulus contends that historians need to examine the fears of slaveholders in regards to slave insurrection. From the 1790s to the 1860s, the Slaveholding Crisis argues, the planter elite pointed to the Haitian Revolution as a constant image of a successful slave uprising. Shaped by these fears, Southerners regarded territorial expansion as the key to preventing revolts. In response to this fear, the South forged its “own version of American exceptionalism—one that placed the perpetuation of slavery at the forefront of the nation’s purpose.”[1] The planter elite used the power of the federal government—a major theme throughout the book—to combat their antislavery opponents and shape a nation willing to safeguard slavery. During the 1840s, slaveholders lost power and stopped regarding America as exceptional. With the rise of the Republican Party in the 1850s, they imagined that those devoted to free-soil would support slaves in deserting their masters, if not provoke wide-scale insurrection. To make matters worse, the planter elite feared that a Republican president, acting as commander in chief, would refuse to send troops to suppress slave uprisings, effectively turning the South “into a North American version of Haiti.”[2] In the end, the South decided that it was safer to form a nation with the centralized powers to defend the cause of slavery even in the face of risking war with the North.

As the news of
Saint-Domingue’s brutal violence found its way to the United States, American
politicians focused on subverting, containing, and propping up domestic
security in the slave states to prevent Haiti’s instability from creeping
northward. According to Paulus, the fears of the planter elite were legitimate.
Influenced by the Haitian Revolution, Gabriel, a Virginia slave owned by Thomas
Prosser, and Denmark Vesey of South Carolina conspired against the planter
class to strike a blow at the shackles of slavery. As a way of preventing
uprisings, slaveholders looked to maintain a white majority and expand their
territory further west. Together the Louisiana Purchase, a move that granted
the expansion of slavery westward,
and the end of the slave trade strengthened Southern national security
by preventing the overpopulation of bondspeople. Many southern slaveholders
also found comfort in the idea that they were different from their neighbors in
Saint-Domingue, trusting that the white population in the free-labor North
would provide resources to extinguish any insurrection. The slaveholders’
belief in the North’s willingness to defend the South was what made “American
slavery and the Union exceptional.”[3]

The following
three chapters of The Slaveholding Crisis
focus on the abolitionist movement at home and abroad as well as the
planter elite’s response to their antislavery critics. During the 1820s and
1830s, slaveholders believed that abolitionist “fanaticism,” as exemplified by
David Walker’s An Appeal to the Coloured
Citizens of the World, saw the North drifting away from the South and
provoking slave insurrections, like Nat Turner’s revolt in Virginia in 1831. To
counter the North’s growing antislavery sentiment, the planter elite adopted
Thomas Dew’s proslavery argument, which defended the institution as a positive
good and cast emancipation in a negative light for both whites and blacks. With
British emancipation in the West Indies, Southerners increasingly felt squeezed
by a world gravitating toward universal liberty and hostile to slavery.
Following the passage of Britain’s Abolition Act in 1833, “in an extraordinary transition from their
earlier arguments based upon states’ rights, the proslavery movement claimed
that the founding documents did not have the capability to protect slaveholders
from a persistent majority in favor of the abolition.”[4]
Slaveholders turned toward the national government to check the growing
antislavery movement in the Atlantic. While in Congress, planters, for example,
took aim at abolitionist literature and blamed it for inciting slave revolts.
With President Andrew Jackson’s blessing, they attempted to wield the power of
the federal government to regulate the Post Office to censor antislavery tracks entering the South. Although the
slaveholders’ plot to limit free speech failed on the national stage,
proslavery congressmen passed an antislavery gag rule. The South’s use of
federal power did not stop there, however. Following historian Matthew Karp’s work on the South’s
push for a stronger navy as a way to safeguard slavery, Paulus details how
planters, in response to growing abolitionism in Britain and the Caribbean,
used their weight to focus Congress on strengthening the South’s naval defenses
around the Gulf of Mexico.[5]

Connected to the
ideas of stability and national security, slaveholders identified territorial
expansion as key to preserving their peculiar institution, leading many
Southerners to advocate for the extension of slavery to the Pacific. Recognizing
the toxic environment that led to the Haitian Revolution—an outnumbered white
population locked within a fixed landmass unable to expand the institution of
bound labor—slaveholders believed that America was different. Not only did they
have a white population in the free states to protect them, but many believed
that westward expansion provided an area in which they could take “excess”
slaves to prevent overpopulation. For these same planters, Texas came to
represent that very land in which they could take their surplus slaves. Many
understood the importance of that area as a natural buffer to protect the
southwestern slave states from outside antislavery interference, notably the
British. Although favoring the
annexation of Texas, David Wilmot unveiled a plan in the House restricting slavery’s
westward expansion to any new territory acquired from the Mexican War, with the
exception of Texas. Southerners protested his measure loudly, highlighting their
need to expand slavery. Reflecting the North’s unwillingness
to grant the South’s demands to increase slave territory, the Wilmot Proviso,
Paulus argues, “became a crucial turning point in American political history.”[6] During
the 1850s, planters believed that the Union, as evidenced by John Brown’s raid
on Harpers Ferry and Abraham Lincoln’s election in 1860, would not protect them
from slave insurrection and therefore came to no longer regard America as
exceptional. Forced to defend against slave uprisings without northern
assistance, slaveholders, even in the face of war with the free states, concluded
that it would be safer to form their own nation.

In sum, Paulus’s work offers much value in explaining the South’s need to expand slavery, an idea that proved just as critical as safeguarding the institution where it already existed. Paulus convincingly argues that this desire by large explains the coming of the Civil War. Indicating a strong historical current, both The Slaveholding Crisis and Matthew Karp’s This Vast Southern Empire: Slaveholders at the Helm of American Foreign Policy (2016) highlight the importance of territorial expansion to slaveholders. Together with James Oakes’s explanation of how the Republican Party aimed to deal with the slavery question in The Scorpion’s Sting: Antislavery and the Coming of the Civil War (2014), Paulus’s work combines to create a clear narrative in detailing the Civil War’s genesis. Due to its excellent research and chronological outline of American political history from the 1790s to the dawn of the Civil War, this elegantly-written work will serve as an invaluable source in undergraduate and graduate classrooms, especially as it pertains to Southern history and the Civil War.

Shawn B. Devaney

Texas Christian
University

[1]
Carl Lawrence Paulus, The Slaveholding
Crisis: Fear of Insurrection and the Coming of the Civil War (Baton Rouge:
Louisiana State University Press, 2017), 6.

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